And Little Wilton, even when he was ten, Little Wilton could smell junk from around the corner. And Eddie doesn’t talk right.”
“Depends on who he’s talking to.”
She touched her index finger to the tip of her nose and pushed her head back slightly. “Not right for Little Wilton,” she said. “You know, Eddie wasn’t exactly the cavalier of my dreams, either. I’d always pictured someone who was a hero, like Big Wilton, shithead that he turned out to be, or a gentleman. Like you, even though you don’t like me. You’re obviously class. Listen to the way you talk. But Eddie’s a good guy. He doesn’t ask too many questions. He loves me, I guess, like he tried to love Wilton. I could have put up with Wilton not liking Eddie because, you know, maybe he was jealous or something. But what I absolutely could not forgive was that Wilton hated Eddie because Wilton was a snob.”
“So you kicked him out.”
“Honey, it was my kid or my husband. Being a woman is expensive. Wilton was too busy lighting fire to small animals and cutting out pictures from the Middle Ages and reading about clubfoots to write the checks. Anyway, he was eighteen-seventeen. It was time. We got him a nice apartment in Westwood, put him in that school, hoped he’d meet a couple of girls.” She leaned forward and tapped my knee. “You know,” she said, “he might have been all right if he’d ever gotten laid.”
It took an effort not to pull my knee away. “Why the Middle Ages?”
“Who knows? It was the only thing he liked. Eddie took him to the Chivalry Faire the first year, and the kid went crazy. Put pictures of castles everywhere, played that awful music all the time. Eddie took him three times after that, every damn year. Fat lot of good it did.”
“Did you go?”
“What’s there? A bunch of weeds, some jerks sweating in their costumes, and a plywood slum pretending to be castles. Why should I go? The first time Eddie took him, Wilton didn’t say a word to him. Just went limping around exploring while Eddie stood there and perspired. So we gave up. Sent him to college to get laid.”
“I guess he didn’t,” I said.
She crossed her legs and let the free ankle swing. “We thought he was going to. He came home from time to time when he needed money and told us about this perfect girl he’d met, how she wanted to move in with him except that she wasn’t that kind of girl, whatever that means. Except for the fact that she didn’t put out, she was perfect, although if she had put out, she wouldn’t have been perfect for Wilton. My God, we heard about her until I got sick of her name. How good she was, how beautiful. How she and he read poetry together and looked at pictures.”
“But you never met her.”
“I’m not sure he ever did. Nobody could have been that beautiful. This one wasn’t even white.”
The worm started to work its way up my back again. “You got sick of her name,” I said. “What was her name?”
“Eleanor,” Alice Lewis said. “Eleanor Chan. Chinese, can you imagine?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I can.” My face was flaming. Whatever it had been, for Wilton it had been a grand passion, and I’d made it cheap with one thoughtless, unretractable remark. Even though I loved her.
“What happened to your first husband?” I asked, just to give myself some room. “Did he keep bothering you? Or Wilton?”
“He tried at first, but Eddie talked to some friends of his, and then he had an accident. He was-” She stopped. It was as though someone had pulled the plug from the wall.
“He was?” I prompted.
“He was laid up at home with two broken legs,” she said in a monotone. “From the accident.” Then she sat straight up and shook her head. “No way,” she said.
“The house burned down,” I said.
She turned back to the mirror, looking not at herself but over her shoulder at me. She breathed through her mouth once, then twice. “It wasn’t Wilton,” she said. A small galaxy of dimples appeared on her chin.
Despite the air-conditioning, my shirt was sticking to my chest, and I tugged it free. “Of course it wasn’t,” I said.
The dimples disappeared. “Go away,” she said. She straightened imperiously. “Finished?” she asked, ready to get up and resume her real life, whatever she thought it was. “Things burn,” she said.
“People, too.” I wanted to see her chin dimple again. It didn’t. “Do you know where he’s living now?”
“I didn’t know where he was living before. Now are you finished?” She swiveled to regard me directly. Annabelle Winston could have pulled it off, but Alice Hoxley Lewis wasn’t big enough for it.
“No,” I said. “You have to do one more thing for me.”
She chewed on it for a second. “What is it?”
“Wilton’s going to call and ask you if I’ve been here.”
“He won’t.”
“I think he will.”
“So don’t worry. I won’t tell him anything.”
“You’ll tell him I was here.” Her jaw dropped in a reaction spontaneous enough to make her son snub her. “And you’ll tell him,” I said, fighting back a yawn, “that I’ll be at home.”
17
Home was the only place to be, if he was supposed to find me.
It took hours to strip the sheets and scrub the mattress until the smell of gasoline had been banished into some parallel universe where Wilton Hoxley might conceivably get caught before he lit me up. When, at 1:00 A.M., I was finished, I went into the living room and pretended to sleep on the couch.
By the time the sun came up, I had dozed for perhaps forty minutes, the temperature was already in the 90s, and my arms felt heavier than my legs.
The clock said 7:00 A.M. The couch was sticky with sweat. I sponged myself off with a cold, wet towel, poured Bravo some water, and called Schultz.
He answered on the first ring despite the hour, sounding as though he’d been waiting all night. “Got her,” I said. I barely recognized my own voice.
“Where are you? What’s she like?”
“Like a freon cocktail. You were right, one hundred percent. She kicked him out. He burned his father. Her first husband.”
“I knew I should have said it out loud,” he said. “When I write it up, people will say it was second- guessing.”
“If that’s your biggest problem, relax. I’ll tell everyone you told me days ago.”
“That would be fudging,” Dr. Norbert Schultz said fretfully.
“And we wouldn’t want you to fudge. Not on something as important, something as indispensable, as writing this up. Think of the fame. You’ll be a standard footnote.”
“I’m an asshole,” Schultz said promptly. I heard a match flare, not the most comforting sound at that moment. “Why are you at home?”
“How’s he supposed to come for me,” I asked Schultz, “if he doesn’t know where I am?”
“Sheeez,” Schultz blew smoke into the mouthpiece. “That’s pushing it a little, don’t you think?”
“I think nobody’s been burned for three days.” I swallowed. “Am I still right? Nobody last night?”
“Clean as a whistle. Except for a couple of houses.” He listened to himself. “Was the father in a house?”
“Yes.”
“Well, since then, houses haven’t been his game, and we’re in the goddamn fire season. We lose houses every night.”
“Maybe houses are his new mission,” I said.
